by Chuck Wendig
A snort.
The floorboards of the barn tremble.
Then: the acrid smell of piss.
Cason shifts, tries to stand, fails. Tries again—gets a leg beneath him, finds that it supports his weight, if barely.
Hobbles over to the metal gate. Doesn’t touch it, as getting another shock from the golden chain isn’t a particularly endearing notion.
But he looks.
The barn is huge. Stall after stall. Dimly lit. Cast mostly in shadow. And up above, in the lofts, he sees hay bales and small wire cages. Can’t see what’s in them, if anything at all.
Another snort. And a stomp. Cason feels the vibration in his ribs.
Down the way and across, he sees something shift in a stall. A glimpse of fiery eyes—like drips of molten iron, glowing in the darkness.
He smells a stink like rotten eggs.
“The hell...?”
It’s a unicorn.
He almost laughs. “Okay, really, though. What is that thing?”
I’m not joking. It’s a unicorn.
Then: a whinny. Buried in the cry is the sound of children screaming.
“I thought unicorns were nice and sweet. Little girls love ’em.”
They were once creatures of rare purity and innocence. But this is not an innocent time. Purity is a legend. Unicorns are... different, now. The Barn is a place where things are kept so they don’t... escape. Like me. Like you. Like the—
The animal slams itself against the stall door, then bleats in pain—Cason imagines the thing just shocked itself, just as he had done before.
Like that unicorn.
“Jesus.” Cason retreats back into the stall, weary and scared.
Jesus has no part of this. May I continue?
“Go for it.”
THE FIRST THING you need to know:
Frank Polcyn is not your friend.
He is not who you think he is.
I see the story he tells you: his wife taken by Aphrodite. He, a man going against the gods to save his wife, but tortured and tormented in the process.
I know Aphrodite. She is my mother-in-law. Since the Exile, she has taken it upon herself to act outside of Zeus’ purview and keep me away from my own husband, so that, in her words, “he may be happy.” And so she kept me like a pet, and as a pet, I saw things.
I saw what happened to Frank Polcyn.
He was a handsome man. Beautiful, even. A shining example of just how perfect humanity could be, given the right random combination of DNA.
Aphrodite wanted him in her collection. Not Frank’s wife.
He didn’t even fight it. I’ve seen true love, and I’ve seen how potent it can be. One will move mountains for love. One will deny the gods for love. I did.
Frank did not.
Frank gave in without a peep or a whimper. His wife, left out in the cold. It was him in that motel room, his wife that went to the bar to wait for him. He never went gambling. He stayed there all day long. Praying at Aphrodite’s temple, so to speak.
I know. I watched. Chained up in the corner.
He bent over backwards to pleasure her. He was like a pig at a trough. This beautiful specimen of man—made to beg and grunt and lap like a beast.
Aphrodite loved it. She loves to subvert man. Loves to subvert love. Her beauty is what matters to her, and she believes it is the pivot on which all the world turns—whenever she can prove it, she will. She had another chance to prove it when Sally Delacroix—now, Sally Polcyn—came back to the motel and found her husband doing things she didn’t even know could be done between two people. Sally sobbed. Begged him. Tried to pull him away.
She tried to get me to help her. But what was I going to do? The chain bound me.
Sally wept and pleaded, and the goddess just laughed.
Aphrodite told Frank: “Take care of her.”
And he did. He carried Sally outside. Kicking and screaming.
He told her how much he hated her. How ugly she was. How this was all just a game, a scam, a con, how he had found true love. He shoved his wedding ring in her mouth. Made her swallow it. Then he picked her up and threw her in the pool.
The humiliation, all a show for Aphrodite.
A week later, Sally killed herself. Wandered the city, tattered and bedraggled before finally stepping in front of a bus.
When Frank heard, he just shrugged. Then he went back to licking Aphrodite’s body clean.
Ah, but then came the day, as it always does, as you saw with my own husband, when the cat is done playing with the mouse, and so eats it or bats it away.
Aphrodite was done with Frank. She’d had her fill. On to the next.
She threw him away. She disappeared.
But Frank was diligent. And obsessed. As they all are, really—but when most are abandoned by the gods, they live out their lives as empty husks. Not Frank. In Frank’s belly grew a terrible fire, and it took him the better part of a year to find her again.
And he did. He came here.
He found her. Begged to be taken back. Threw himself at her mercy.
His pleas turned grim. He threatened to burn the place down. To tell the world who she really was. He was enraged. Insane. Desperate for her love—the wild-eyed aggression born of rejection and obsession.
But you don’t threaten the gods.
As you’ll learn.
She took this handsome man and she made him ugly.
She did to him as he did to his wife: threw him in the pool, and here his story meets the reality—she churned the waters and made them come alive and had them cut him, flay him, excise lips and nose and fingers and toes, flesh carved away until he was vented like fish gills, bleeding everywhere, made hideous by her affections.
And then she threw him away.
As he did with Sally.
But it did not cow him. It did not send him to die. It filled all his empty spaces with even greater rage. That, then, is what his purpose is, to—
A SUDDEN FRESH flurry of gate rattling, snorting, neighing, stomping—
The unicorn is pissed.
Cason is, too. Pissed that Frank lied to him. He tries to find a way around it, wonders if maybe the so-called goddess is deceiving him, just to get in his head. But if it’s true... if Frank put his own wife through hell like that and didn’t care... Cason can’t ever imagine doing that to Alison. Alison could try to kill him ten times a day and he’d never treat her that way.
The Barn shakes as the unicorn stomps around.
No beast likes to be caged.
“Tell me about it.”
I can see this one. She’s across from me. Red eyes glowing. Plumes of hot sulfur from her nose. She’d much rather be out there than in here.
“And what is it a unicorn wants to do?”
I don’t know. I don’t know her mind, can’t get into it. Fighting? Fornicating? Running free? When they find a wild monster and cage it here, it’s not because it wants to frolic about and drink tea with little girls. We’ve had all manner of creature here. Ghouls. Glaistigs. Anthropophagi. Bishop Fish in the lake. Dybbuk boxes in the loft. Not all the creatures of the infinite bestiary are dangerous—I’ve met Feng Huang, for instance, and found him cordial, if a little insane—but many are, and when the gods of the respective protectorates track down such a creature they contain it. First in places like this, later in... deeper, darker prisons.
“Who the hell are you people?”
That’s just it. We’re not people. We’re gods, once of spirit, recently of flesh. Thrown from the firmament to the fundament. I was human, once, but that’s over and done. I barely understand humans anymore. I did something before they reclaimed me, brought me to the Barn. I killed... well. I killed a number of policemen. And I felt no remorse. The only remorse I felt was at feeling no remorse, isn’t that strange?
“Sounds pretty awful to me.”
It is. I’m awful. My beauty is fading, and I’m becoming less like me and more like them. Which is, I suppose,
what we should talk about next, because you’re more like them than you know, Cason Cole.
RIGHT NOW, YOUR body is broken. But it’s healing. All bodies would be—but you stood up just minutes ago. On legs that were snapped like a piece of peanut brittle, only hours ago. All after sustaining attacks that would’ve killed anybody else. You should’ve died battling Meesink, that poor dumb wilderness spirit—were you anybody else, your body would’ve been pulverized. Look back over all your fights. Look how many injuries you sustained. Look at how hard they had to hit you just to make a bruise.
Lesser men would’ve brain-bled. Never to fight again.
You are not lesser men.
You are barely a ‘man’ at all, Cason.
You are human. If a little. I see that spark inside you—bright like a torch on the beach, the human soul in all its glittering, shimmery unpredictability.
But the rest of you is divine.
It’s how you survived this long; it’s how you’re healing even now. And it’s why the gods wanted to control you.
There was a conspiracy against you.
A car comes out of nowhere. Strikes your own. Your wife and child burn.
That, the province of a god named Slogutis. A god of pain and misery—pain is a channel for him, a doorway. He can open up a body, cut into it with invisible knives, and step in through the unseen wound to puppet the body. He wore the driver’s skin. The driver of the white SUV.
Then: time stops. The fire frozen. Your wife and son, rescued from certain death, resurrected—both these things the responsibility of the Ollathir, Dagda, an old mad god who is father to Dana and also her son. And also, her lover. Such is the nature of time gods; they are able to be their own parents. (It unsettles me still.)
Then my husband—though I suppose with a heavy heart I should acquiesce to calling him my ‘late husband,’ should I not?—Eros steps in and makes the offer. Your eternal service for their lives. A trade you easily made. Why wouldn’t you? You know love. I see that. Sometimes love in humans isn’t really love, but something else: lust, need, hate turned on its ear. But for you it’s pure, uncut love. And so you said yes. Of course you did.
And with it, the noose tightened. They wanted you in their pocket. For reasons I cannot comprehend; I can see inside the minds of gods as I can humans, but with others of my kind the trip is short-lived, as they sense me probing. I’m always on a time limit and so my discoveries remain incomplete. There remains one more piece of the puzzle missing, another divine hand at work—a long reach with fingers deep in the mud, but I do not know who. I can see the trail—
CASON CAN’T HACK it anymore. Again he stands on legs less wobbly than before, legs that she’s right about—he has no right to be standing on these damn things, and yet here he is, up and marching toward the gate again, fury twisting fast through his arteries like a bullet down a rifle barrel. He marches to the gate, growls, delivers a hard kick—
And shock lances through him.
He’s blown back against the stall wall, where the golden chain dangles on the other side—delivering a second shock. Boom. He falls forward on his hands and knees. Gasping for air and finding little.
You cannot break the chain. You cannot move the chain.
“You...” Gasp. “You did it.”
You helped me do it.
“Fuck.”
Sorry.
“Nergal.” Cason almost weeps with the pain. “You didn’t mention Nergal.”
I did not, no.
“What”—he swallows hard—“What role did he play?”
He played no role at all.
“Don’t fuckin’ lie to me. Don’t! Not now.”
I’m not lying. I’m sorry. He was the wrong target. Dagda stopped time. Dagda revivified your wife and child. And you don’t want to fight him.
He presses his forehead against the wood. Hay prickles the skin. Guilt goes through him. Nergal wasn’t innocent. He animated the bodies of dead teenagers—teenagers he probably killed himself—to serve as his ‘bodyguards.’ He was a fucking nutball. Death and storms and flies and...
And yet, Cason feels shame over the act. His own divine heritage shouting out for justice? Is he really not altogether human?
“My parents,” he says, his words more a desperate bleat than anything else. “Who were my parents?”
But no answer is forthcoming.
“Hey. You. I’m talking to you.”
Nothing still.
“Psyche, if you’re there, I swear to God—”
God cares little for what you swear. Hush now. Someone is coming.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The Ugly Little Nightmare Man
SLOGUTIS DRIVES THE golf-cart, whistling a jaunty tune. He’s not sure what it is, at first—just an earworm that crawled into his head and laid eggs. Something from an American television show from days past. I Dream of Jeannie? No. Bewitched! That’s the one. Bewitched. Not entirely inappropriate, really.
The golf-cart bounds through the night, away from the farmhouse and toward the distant Barn—a Barn that sits a quarter-mile thattaway, kept separate from the house just in case one of the, erm, ‘residents’ should somehow get free.
Sprinklers wet the grass.
To his left: a lovely pond, the dock painted brick red.
To his right: a springhouse lovingly put together with rocks.
Beneath him, beneath the ground itself and so not visible to the eyes: the temple-mazes, where the gods of the protectorate gather for rituals and where they bring their most beloved cultists for hymns, paeans, chants, odes, invocations, evocations, summonings, banishings, pleasure orgies, mating orgies, blood orgies, birth rites, death rites, first rites, last rites, parties, food, drink, and assorted magic miscellany.
Slogutis hasn’t been down there in a while.
Slogutis isn’t very important.
After all, not all gods are created equal. And the Exile didn’t help matters—it just shook up all the pieces, and now the gameboard looks like a hundred chess sets (and checkers, and Battleship and Scrabble) all smashed together.
Slogutis has always been something of a pawn in this game. He knows it. He’s not particularly happy about it, but he’s found comfort—a cold and slimy comfort, yes, but comfort just the same.
Some gods are primal. They’ve been here since the beginning, or close enough to it—as mankind was born, so too were the gods. No god predates humanity, of course, but fuck, don’t remind them of that. Most of them... ennnh, not a fan of the idea, and many have convinced themselves otherwise.
At the other end of the spectrum are the half-gods, the demi-gods, gods that were once human, or at least, didn’t start out divine.
Beneath them: all the monsters, creatures, slaves, spirits, demons, half-breeds, automatons. Plus your heroes, your avatars, your what-have-yous.
Slogutis isn’t any of those.
He’s firmly fixed in the mushy, gooshy middle—the hazy gauzy nowheresville belonging to the largest bulk of deitydom, the ‘lesser gods.’ They’re gods. Proper gods. But nobody really gives much of a shit about them. Hanuman? Eh. Monkeys; so what. Oh, you’re the god of a tiny island in the Pacific? Well, bully for you, you big fat fish in a tiny fucking pond—don’t swim up-river, or the big gods will eat you. Is the Pacific a pond or a river? Slogutis isn’t sure, and doesn’t much care. Gods of, what, of trees and breezes, of words and friezes, of rainbows and spring flowers and spiders and blah-blah-blah.
Slogutis knew this one old broad—Ament. ‘Greeter of the Dead,’ that was her gig in the old life. The spirits of the dead came to her, and before they officially passed on to their respective Otherworlds, she handed them, like, a piece of bread, a couple coins, and a map. You know what she does now? Same thing, basically. Attendant at Disneyland. Or Disneyworld, whatever. She doesn’t hand out bread, but she gives out tickets and tokens and, sure enough, a stupid fucking map.
Ament really owns the ‘lesser god’ thing.
; Thing is, Slogutis shouldn’t really be a lesser god. His dominion isn’t puppy tails or squirrel turds or some obscure emotion like ennui. It’s pain! Anguish! Misery. Core components of the essential human experience. In fact, if you ask him, Slogutis will tell you that they are in fact the very keystone of what it means to be human. Outside birth and death, the only thing a human is guaranteed to experience is pain. Pleasure, maybe. Pain, certainly. Hell, it’s not like he’s got much competition. You’re a storm god, like Shango, you’re in a pretty crowded elevator—explains why he was slinging arrows earlier, talking trash. There’s a lot of sour grapes within given dominions. But who’s Slogutis shouldering out? A few pain spirits? A couple avatars of misery? Or there’s Acheron, who swears he’s a god of pain but really, let’s be honest, he’s the god of the river of pain (uh, big difference).
All that should bump him up the ladder, shouldn’t it?
But it doesn’t. He’s not from a primary pantheon, they say. Nobody worships pain and misery, they claim. Oh, and he’s unpleasant. “Like a tree grub,” that’s how Aphrodite referred to him just last week.
So he’s a nobody.
Except when they need him. Like now.
They shoved him in a golf-cart, told him to bring Cason Cole up to the house. Oh, and, as Aphrodite herself said: “Make him feel it.”
In other words: hurt him. Deep hurt. Pain of many flavors.
Which brings Slogutis happiness, if temporary. Any chance to do what he does best shines a light in an otherwise foggy, depressing existence.
Up ahead, then: the Barn. It’s a big building. Old, technically, though refinished to the point where the only original wood is the floor. The whole thing the color of blood, which Slogutis figured was because... well, blood wouldn’t show, then, would it? But when he suggested that, the other gods just looked at him (again) like he was some kind of freak. “No,” Aphrodite explained, “it’s because American barns are traditionally red.”
Fine. Whatever. She’s so unpleasant. Beautiful, sure, but it’s like putting a dress on a badger. Pretty dress. Nice face. Still a badger.